“You would go into a saloon after a day mining to get a drink and you would pay in gold dust and the bartenders would take a pinch of your gold dust and that would be like the cost of a drink. So they would hire the bartenders based on the size of their thumbs. Isn't that amazing?”
99% Invisible · Product & Design · November 2026
Context
Brown explains that Gold Rush San Francisco had no mint, so people paid with raw gold dust. She is passing on a detail from the researcher whose work the episode draws on.
Transcript
Yeah. That like you could make in a day what it would take to make in a year.
Almost a year. Yeah. That's crazy.
Yeah. So at this point, there isn't a mint in San Francisco. So you just have raw gold that people are kind of carrying around and taking to assayers that are pressing it into something. But often you would pay for stuff with gold dust. And there's this incredible fact that Gary told me that you would go into a saloon after a day mining to get a drink and you would pay in gold dust and the bartenders would take a pinch of your gold dust and that would be like the cost of a drink. So they would hire the bartenders based on the size of their thumbs. Isn't that amazing?
Get the biggest pinch possible with your big meat hooks. Yeah.
Exactly, exactly. So in all, between 1848 and 1855, 300,000 people travel to California.
And so like the idea of people who normally make $6 in a month all of a sudden making $75 in a day. What does that do to the U.S. economy?
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